Artfully
Concealed Prohibited Items –
It’s important to examine your bags prior to traveling to ensure no prohibited
items are inside. If a prohibited item is discovered in your bag or on your
body, you could be cited and quite possibly arrested by local law enforcement.
Here are a few examples from this week where prohibited items were found by our
officers in strange places.

Three
credit card knives were discovered this week. Two were discovered at
Albuquerque (ABQ), and one was found at Mobile (MOB).

Knife Discovered Using AIT (DAL)

AIT
Discoveries:

A
double-edged knife was detected in the front right pocket of a passenger at San
Francisco (SFO).

A pocket
knife was discovered in the front waistband of a passenger at Dallas (DAL).

Firearms - Left to Right - Top to Bottom: LBB, RSW, TRI, TUL, IAH, MOB, DTW

*In
order to provide a timely weekly update, I compile my data from a preliminary
report. The year-end numbers will vary slightly from what I report
in the weekly updates. However, any monthly, midyear, or end-of-year numbers
TSA provides on this blog or elsewhere will not be estimates.

Unfortunately
these sorts of occurrences are all too frequent which is why we talk about
these finds. Sure, it’s great to share the things that our officers are
finding, but at the same time, each time we find a dangerous item, the
throughput is slowed down and a passenger that likely had no ill intent ends up
with a citation or in some cases is even arrested. The passenger can face a
penalty as high as $7,500.00. This is a friendly reminder to please
leave these items at home. Just because we find a prohibited item on an
individual does not mean they had bad intentions, that's for the law
enforcement officer to decide. In many cases, people simply forgot they had these
items.

Whats wrong with these people? What makes them think they can get past the TSA people? And if you do what have you accomplished, fooled the authorities, SO??? You wont get any publicity because their never going to advertise their failures. Doy?

Anonymous Anonymous said...28 guns? Out of the 12,000,000 million people who flew last week on 210,000 flights, that is .00002% of passengers and .01% of flights.

Your stats are insignificant, Bob, therefore it is a waste of tax dollars for you to post these useless blotters.

*screen shot*

January 11, 2014 at 11:02 AM

..........................Each week Bob posts the same post week after week after week. These postings of Bob have absolutely no value, do not address the mission of this blog and are a total waste of everyones time.

How about answering some of the many questions that are being asked each week Bob? That would be a constructive use of your time.

Why do you folks bother posting these, anymore? It long ago became clear that the vast majority of firearms found in TSA checkpoints come from harmless and otherwise law-abiding people who simply made a mistake. The piffling few people who are going to become hysterical over the idea of a firearm on (*gasp*) an airplane are exactly the piffling few people who are appreciative that the TSA is able so completely to screw up someone's life for an honest and harmless mistake. It would also be nice to see just how many of our intrepid protectors' gallant confiscations in the face of terr'rist evil-doers were somehow not possible before the TSA and its peep show scanners came on the scene.

"The piffling few people who are going to become hysterical over the idea of a firearm on (*gasp*) an airplane are exactly the piffling few people who are appreciative that the TSA is able so completely to screw up someone's life for an honest and harmless mistake."

As a responsible gun owner myself I have no problem whatsoever with TSA referring every firearm incident to law enforcement. If you don't know where your gun is and forgot it was in your bag you aren't a responsible gun owner. Name one airline that would allow any passenger to carry on a firearm. Without TSA any airline would have the right to ask you to open your bags and screen you with a metal detector. Sound familiar? That's exactly how it was before TSA and legal as an adiminstrative search. Many of us respected the purpose of why TSA was created and this was always one of those reasons. The Frankenstein monster it became in so many other ways I'll save for another post.

I find these posts rather interesting and enlightening. It never ceases to amaze me how many people would carry into the airport. I would like to know when these confiscated items are auctioned off if the people that tried to carry them on do not claim them. Please post if there are any and where they are located.

Yet once again, nothing dangerous found that requires the expensive, invasive, slow and obviously ineffective full body scanners. A knife, besides not being a threat to aviation and being available after screening, is detected more efficiently by metal detectors, which don´t miss objects under pancakes, on the side of the body or in orifices.

Why do you still use these machines?

Also, why still impose shoe removal? If Pre can be done without shoe removal, and flights from abroad are safe to land in the US without shoe removal, it follows that shoe removal does not add to safety.

A whopping TWO small knives that would have been more reliably detected by metal detectors. And how long has it been since the last time you mentioned anything the naked body scanners found in one of these pathetic weekly roundups? When will you people admit the naked body scanners are slow, invasive, and don't make anyone safer, Curtis?

Too bad is only a common pocket knife. Nothing that is a threat to the aircraft or its passengers.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to get poked with a pocket knife, but one guy with a pocket knife versus an entire aircraft of passengers.... they would need one of those fancy steam cleaners to get the guy out of the carpet.

I am thankful for the work TSA does. It may seem trivial to some, but not I. One thing terrorists have is patience to wait many years to have an opportunity to strike. If we let our guard down, they will take advantage

When are you people that post information and uninformed comments on 'naked body scanners' going to wake up and do some actual research on the subject matter?

All millimeter wave AIT units deployed at airports are outfitted with software designed to enhance passenger privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images and instead auto-detecting potential threats and highlighting their location on a generic outline of a passenger that is identical for all passengers.

In regards to aviation security check your facts again. It has been in place since the early 1970s after a series of hijacking’s and high profile bombings. To say or champion a reduced role for TSA at our nation’s airports tells me you have no concept of the threat that's out there.

Take it from someone that has served our country for over ten years and has deployed under combat conditions to various regions around the world. I have seen the brutality of our enemy; they want you dead!!! And they give no quarter for women, children or the elderly.

They only have one goal; to martyr themselves by conducting jihad on you and me.

And what about some guy or gal that recently got fired or is pi#@ed off at the world? Do you want to get on an airplane with someone that hasn't been screened?I don't.

I'd rather spend ten or fifteen minutes standing in a line waiting to be screened and maybe twenty seconds (if that)in the AIT, than having what's left of my person being picked up by the medical examiner at a crime/crash screen.

If you doubt their resolve, I invite you to review the events that took place on September the 11, 2001. I will never forget seeing people having to make the decision to hurl themselves out of a window at 1,368 feet rather than burn to death.

I appreciate the hard work that TSA does every day to keep me and my family safe when flying. Keep up the good work officers!

LOL, and yet the 11 Set terrorist only had smal pocket knifes... So you comment is invalid"SSSS for Some Reason said...

Yeah! You found something with your fancy scanners.

Too bad is only a common pocket knife. Nothing that is a threat to the aircraft or its passengers.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to get poked with a pocket knife, but one guy with a pocket knife versus an entire aircraft of passengers.... they would need one of those fancy steam cleaners to get the guy out of the carpet.

To anonymous who said "All millimeter wave AIT units deployed at airports are outfitted with software designed to enhance passenger privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images and instead auto-detecting potential threats and highlighting their location on a generic outline of a passenger that is identical for all passengers."

That in itself is a problem, you see, because anyone with a prosthesis, insulin pump, ostomy or any other non-metallic medical device that is of no concern whatsoever to the TSA is singled out. Yes, the machines continue to be invasive even with the automated target recognition.

And most of all, these machines are ineffective. There are many ways to defeat them (many more than metal detectors), and the TSA never finds anything, week after week, using these expensive and slow devices.

Anonymous said...When are you people that post information and uninformed comments on 'naked body scanners' going to wake up and do some actual research on the subject matter?

All millimeter wave AIT units deployed at airports are outfitted with software designed to enhance passenger privacy by eliminating passenger-specific images and instead auto-detecting potential threats and highlighting their location on a generic outline of a passenger that is identical for all passengers.................

Perhaps you are the one that should do a bit of research on the subject of Naked Body Scanners. The contract specification that TSA submitted require the ability to not only store images but the ability to transmit those images over an Ethernet connection. These images are not the sanitized images seen on the screen at the scanner but the full resolution images that the machine takes when scanning people including little kids. Just because the TSA clerk standing by the machine only sees the ATR image doesn't mean that TSA does not have hundreds of thousands of full resolution images on file.

Nothing has changed with the removal of Backscatter Strip Search Machines. A Strip Search, even when done electronically, is steal a Strip Search and exceeds all limits of an Administrative Search.